He was cruel to a small portion of his country, the nobility. Which means he wasn’t a “good” guy in the classical sense.
However he allowed the poor people many freedoms and reforms for the time. One of which was allowing the common man to serve in the military, which was why Transylvania was able to field relatively huge armies for its size. Most armies at the time were composed of fighting classes or paid mercenaries.
IMO he was a complex character..murdering many nobility in the most barbaric fashions yet uplifting the commoner and fighting Islams invasions fiercely.
What you mean is that he didn’t spare the nobility from his acts of gruesome horror. By far, the vast majority of his torture victims were poor people, and the majority of them were children. It’s pretty sick that we’re debating the merits of Vlad.
And, of course, it’s darkly ironic to read of forcibly enlisting poorly trained and unequipped peasants to commit war crimes which would bring vengeance down upon them as a “reform.”